Traditional agriculture has, for centuries, been carried forward on plots of land, typically referred to as “farms”. Farms have been utilized in a virtually endless variety of climates, geographical locales, sizes and circumstances. As populations increased and non-farming land use increased, reduced amounts of agricultural land have been available. In many areas of the world, this reduction of available land for farming has become critical. As the competition for land between agricultural food producers and non-agricultural land users has intensified, agricultural food producers have struggled to supply food to ever increasing populations using less and less land. This pressure has lead many food producers to explore non-tradition methods of farming. One promising alternative to traditional farming methods is found in hydroponics. Hydroponics is basically a system of agriculture which involves growing plants in a water and nutrient mixture without the use of soil. While a number of different hydroponic systems have been developed, typically all utilize an absorbent growing medium that supports seeds and growing plants such that the plant roots extend into a nutrient-rich water solution.
While hydroponic systems were received initially as bearing great promise, development of efficient cost-effective and practical agriculture has eluded practitioners in the agricultural arts. Hydroponic systems have, for the most part, proven to be costly and complex structures that still require substantially the same extensive land areas as traditional farming. In addition, the complex structures required to grow large crops in a manner that is cost competitive with traditional farming has not been attained. There remains therefore a continuing and unresolved need in the art for a system of agriculture that effectively and efficiently addresses the critical shortage of farm land throughout the world. There remains a continuing and unresolved need in the agricultural arts for a system of agriculture that is capable of growing greater crops for a given area of land.
Construction of hydroponic agricultural systems has, for the most part, proven to difficult and expensive. The fabrication of hydroponic agricultural systems has focus primarily upon expensive space-consuming apparatus.